http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/books/ta-nehisi-coates-to-write-black-panther-comic-for-marvel.html?referrer=&_r=0
The cover of Black Panther No. 1, to be published next year, drawn by Brian Stelfreeze.
MARVEL ENTERTAINMENT
By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES
SEPTEMBER 22, 2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates can be identified in many ways: as a national correspondent for The Atlantic, as an author and, as of this month, as a nominee for the National Book Award’s nonfiction prize. But Mr. Coates also has a not-so-secret identity, as evidenced by some of his Atlantic blog posts and his Twitter feed: Marvel Comics superfan.
So it seems only natural that Marvel has asked Mr. Coates to take on a new Black Panther series set to begin next spring. Writing for that comics publisher is a childhood dream that, despite the seeming incongruity, came about thanks to his day job. “The Atlantic is a pretty diverse place in terms of interest, but there are no comics nerds,” besides himself, Mr. Coates said in an interview.
His passions intersected in May, during the magazine’s New York Ideas seminar, when he interviewed Sana Amanat, a Marvel editor, about diversity and inclusion in comic books. Ms. Amanat led the creation of the new Ms. Marvel, a teenage Muslim girl living in Jersey City, based on some of her own childhood experiences.
“It was a fruitful discussion,” he recalled.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
GABRIELLA DEMCZUK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
After that event, Marvel reached out, paired Mr. Coates with an editor, and discussions about the comic began. The renewed focus on Black Panther is no surprise. Created in 1966, he is the first black superhero and hails from Wakanda, a fictional African country.
“He has the baddest costume in comics and is a dude who is smarter and better than everyone,” said Axel Alonso, the editor in chief of Marvel. The character not only adds to the diversity of Marvel’s comics; he will do it for their films too: Black Panther is set to make his big-screen debut next year in “Captain America: Civil War,” followed by a solo feature in 2018.
At first glance, it may seem odd for Mr. Coates to write a mainstream superhero comic. He has been lauded for his book “Between the World and Me,” a passionate letter to his son on being black in America. But he does not see anything odd about it. “I don’t experience the stuff I write about as weighty,” he said. “I feel a strong need to express something. The writing usually lifts the weight. I expect to be doing the same thing for Marvel.”
“A Nation Under Our Feet,” the yearlong story line written by Mr. Coates and drawn by Brian Stelfreeze, is inspired by the 2003 book of the same title by Steven Hahn. It will find the hero dealing with a violent uprising in his country set off by a superhuman terrorist group called the People. “It’s going to be a story that repositions the Black Panther in the minds of readers,” Mr. Alonso said. “It really moves him forward.”
A variant cover of the first issue, also drawn by Brian Stelfreeze, inspired by Jay Z's "The Black Album."
MARVEL ENTERTAINMENT
Mr. Coates’s enthusiasm for Marvel started when he was a boy. Marvel was “an intimate part of my childhood and, at this point, part of my adulthood,” he said. “It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.”
Mr. Coates, 39, began reading comics in the mid-1980s and was introduced to three minority characters: Storm, the leader of the X-Men; Monica Rambeau, who had taken on the name Captain Marvel; and James Rhodes, who was Iron Man. “They were obviously black,” he recalled, but it was not made into a big deal. Still, he said: “I’m sure it meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.”
Diversity — in characters and creators — is a drumbeat to which the comic book industry is increasingly trying to march. Marvel recently announced the December start of “The Totally Awesome Hulk,” whose title character is Amadeus Cho, a genius Korean-American scientist who will find himself transforming into that emerald behemoth. The book is written by Greg Pak and drawn by Frank Cho, both of whom are Korean-American. (“My wife is Korean, so I scored massive points,” Mr. Alonso said.)
Over at DC, Cyborg, who is black, is starring in his own series (and a film in 2020), and Beth Ross is the first female (and teenage) commander in chief in the biting satire “Prez.” This month Image Comics released “Virgil,” a graphic novel by Steve Orlando and J. D. Faith, about a black, gay cop in the not-so-inclusive Kingston, in Jamaica. “Showing different faces under the masks is very important for everyone,” Mr. Alonso said.
But it all begins with the quality of the story, and Mr. Coates is ecstatic for the challenge. This writing assignment was not about “trying to please 12-year-old me,” he said. Another inspiration, he added, is the work of Jonathan Hickman on “Secret Wars” and “the depth he’s able to get from characters.”
“You don’t come in off the board and come in at that level,” he said of Mr. Hickman’s work. “But it helps to want it to be great. I want to make a great comic. I really, really do.”
Marvel is doing this while DC is gaying up Mr. Terrific.Ta-Nehisi Coates Annotates His Black Panther Debut
After months of waiting, one of the most hotly anticipated comic books of recent years has arrived: Black Panther No. 1, as authored by superstar nonfiction writer and longtime geek Ta-Nehisi Coates. Publisher Marvel Comics announced in September that Coates — writer of the acclaimedBetween the World and Me — would be penning the monthly comics series, with artwork from veteran penciler Brian Stelfreeze. The specifics of the narrative were kept under wraps, but one thing was certain: A lot of people who were fans of Coates and not necessarily fans of comics would be picking up this issue.
Now that it’s here, you might be surprised at how steeped it is in references to past Black Panther stories. In an interview from his home in Paris, Coates says he just wanted “to tell a really, really good story,” and given his love of Marvel's rich history, he drew on a lot of what had gone before. So in order to clarify anything that might be confusing, we asked Coates to help us annotate the issue, page by page. If something isn’t annotated here, that’s because it’s explained within the issue or is a new concept or character with no preexisting background information. Let the continuity-mining begin!
Page 1
WakandaLet's start with the setting, since almost everything in the issue flows from there. Wakanda is a fictional, technologically advanced African nation that was never taken over by European colonialists. It's recently been through some hardships, which will be enumerated later. “The country's been devastated a few times," says Coates. "This is a country whose identity was,We've never been conquered. We're Wakanda the invincible, Wakanda the unbreakable. The fact of the matter is, over the past few years, you've seen Wakanda broken several times, and so the question is, What is Wakanda now?”
T’Challa/Black Panther
Our protagonist. The character first appeared in the pages of Fantastic Four in 1966 and has been a mainstay ever since, often using his genius intellect and fighting prowess alongside other Marvel superheroes. The role and costume of the Black Panther is one given to Wakanda's monarchs. "He's the king of Wakanda. I think in past portrayals, he's been portrayed as very proud of what Wakanda is and a very, very proud man. My T'Challa is probably less proud and probably has less of that arrogance with him, and that's probably because I always found the pride and the arrogance distancing.”
After temporarily losing the throne to his sister (we’ll get into that below), a Wakandan god made him the first “King of the Dead,” a mystical role that allowed him to commune with his ancestors. He still has that role, but is once again the ruler of Wakanda, too. He’s had a rough few years. “He still has confidence. He's not a broken dude. He's still very, very clear on what he's capable of and what he's doing, but I think he's much more interested in what it means to be a king. I think he's much more interested in why he's a king. I think he's much more interested in whether he shouldbe a king. I think he's much more interested in what his relationship to Wakanda actually should be.”
T’Chaka (left background figure, above)
T’Challa’s late father, the previous king of Wakanda and previous holder of the Black Panther mantle, appears in the first panel. It's a re-creation of a scene from a recent Black Panther story. “T’Challa basically has the ability to communicate with his ancestors, all people who have been Black Panthers before. There's a very, very moving conversation between T’Challa and his ancestors in which they urge him to really do whatever he has to do to protect Wakanda, however immoral it is. This comes to the point where he's basically told to destroy another planet to save Earth. He says he'll do it under the influence of his ancestors, but when time comes to do it, he can't. He can't bring himself to do it. Because he can't, he's kicked out. His father basically says, ‘You're not my son.’ His ancestry is severed. I thought that had to be pretty painful."
Namor (middle figure, above)
The ruler of the underwater kingdom of Atlantis and a longtime Marvel anti-hero. While under the influence of alien intelligence, he flooded Wakanda, killing many. But afterward, T’Challa worked with him on a secret team of superpowered individuals. “The second panel is from a moment when T'Challa is discovered to actually be cooperating with Namor, who is a complete enemy of Wakanda for having flooded the country. This enemy of Wakanda is the person that he ends up talking to. He says, ‘You've spent your life building a perfect kingdom, and now you've been cast out.’ The notion is that he's been pushed out again.”
The Dora Milaje (right figure, above)
Wakanda’s elite, all-female squadron of royal bodyguards. They appear in yet another flashback. “The third panel is a moment that precedes [the Namor moment], and it is when the Dora Milaje reject him. That’s when it's discovered that, in fact, he's been working with Namor, and they say, ‘You have lost your way, my king. You have lost your soul.’ So he's king now, right, but he's experienced this rejection.”
“I've always seen the Dora Milaje as a bit problematic, and that's going to divide me from most fans of the Black Panther. One of them is taken from every tribe in Wakanda and brought in, and T'Challa has the option of taking one of them as a wife. [I don’t like] the idea of these scantily clad bodyguards for this dude who's the king and the notion that he doesn't abuse that or that this is okay. I wanted to do something different. I try to see them as independent people and not people who we see strictly through the gaze of the male comic-book fans.”
Page 2
The Great Mound
“The Great Mound is a mountain where all the vibranium is, and vibranium is the resource that gives Wakanda much of its wealth.”
Page 4
Wakandan language
Unlike Klingon or Dothraki, there’s no official version of the fictional Wakandan language. In this story, we mostly see it translated into English, but there are a few words Coates wanted to play around with in untranslated form. It resembles real languages, but don’t bother trying to find literal translations of the Wakandan terms. “I could have created a Wakandan language from scratch, but the idea is that Wakandan, as represented to the reader, pulls from a variety of African languages. [The language is] imagined as an amalgam. I think there's a little bit of Hausa in there. There might be some Swahili in there. There might be a little bit of Shona in there.”
Page 7
Excerpt from page 15 of Black Panther No. 1. Photo: Brian Stelfreeze/Marvel Entertainment
The Golden City
“The Golden City is the capital of Wakanda. This is Washington and New York. This is the Paris of Wakanda. It will probably not have that name by issue 13. Neither will the Great Mound. All that stuff's going to be Africanized.”
Aneka
“She’s the captain of a group of Dora Milaje. She eventually became the leader of this group called the Midnight Angels. It's supposed to be an even more crack group of Dora Milaje.”
Shuri
T’Challa’s late sister. After an assassination attempt on T’Challa, she became Queen of Wakanda and another, simultaneously operating Black Panther. But in a recent story, she was killed and T’Challa returned to the throne. “Their relationship was broken at the point that she died. Basically, she was pissed off at him. There were various times where T'Challa would try to counsel her to not go to war with Atlantis; she did it anyway. When she found out T'Challa was scheming with Namor, she basically cast him out.”
Ramonda (the robed woman)
One of the late T'Chaka's wives and mother of Shuri, but not T'Challa. “Ramonda is T'Challa's mother, although not his birth mother. But she's the woman he considers to be his mother. She married T'Challa's father. She had a very important role; she basically ruled in his stead. She's been an adviser. She's an elder there.”
Kimoyo
“Kimoyo is something that my predecessor, [past Black Panther writer] Christopher Priest, came up with. He had a Kimoyo Card, which is almost like this smartphone-in-a-card that Black Panther used. We changed it a little bit and turned it into a band that all Wakandans have, and they do different things depending on who the Wakandan is. Obviously, if you're king, yours does a lot more.”
Page 10
N’Yami/T’Challa’s mother
She was one of T’Chaka’s wives, and she died in childbirth.
Death of T’Chaka
He refused to grant first-world economies access to Wakanda's vibranium, and a cabal of powerful operatives had him assassinated.
Page 11
Soul-Stalker technology
“T'Challa has heightened senses. That's one of his powers, but I think it's one that hasn't been used as much as it could be. I definitely wanted to use more of that, but I thought one way you could do it is, what if all of those things came together and allowed for another sense, a heightened sense taken together with something bigger than that, something almost spiritual? It's like a sixth sense.”
Page 12
Excerpt from page 15 of Black Panther No. 1. Photo: Brian Stelfreeze/Marvel Entertainment
“Invasion”Though Wakanda prides itself on never being invaded by colonial powers, it was recently invaded and crushed by a sinister group of intergalactic supervillains called the Black Order. One of them killed Shuri. They’ve since been run out, but the psychological damage was done.
“Flood”
The aforementioned flooding at the hands of Namor.
“Infiltration”
Longtime Marvel supervillain Doctor Doom recently engineered an unsuccessful but very public coup within Wakanda.
“Regicide”
The death of Shuri.
Page 15
Niganda
“Niganda is a country that neighbors Wakanda, and they have not been as fortunate in history as Wakanda has. [Black Panther nemesis] Killmonger [in a recent story] tried to organize the Nigandans to basically overthrow T'Challa and take over Wakanda. It's a poorer country.”
If you’re looking for further reading, Coates recommends the story that is “most immediate” to his run with the character: writer Jonathan Hickman’s
33-issue series New Avengers, which ran from 2013 to 2015 and prominently featured many of the events referenced in this first issue. And if you like or don’t like this issue, Coates has a helpful guide on who to blame: “Listen, if this sucks, it's me; and if it's great, it's Brian [Stelfreeze]. Even though I'm joking, I kind of mean that, because Brian, he's just made this look so beautiful.”
http://www.vulture.com/2016/04/ta-nehisi-coates-black-panther-annotated.html
warriors can't be wakandan?Lesbian warriors in African based comics
Where i get up and applaud this as loud and as hard i can. That's why i didn't want him to write the book. And that's why i didn't want Priest to write the books. Coates doesn't know about wakanda. And what Priest was trying to make wakanda into. And Priest was going to put Panther with a white woman.
Yep.
